How To Create An ASP.NET Designer Host

Question

I have been asked to build an application where I can drag and drop few WebControls onto the WebPage designer surface.

So far I have read some articles on .NET Framework Design-Time architecture, like, MSDN Article: Hosting WinForms Designers, Developer Function Article etc.

But I can't a find a way to host WebForms designer. The only open source implementation that I could find was Mono Develop ASP.NET Visual Designer.

But in mono they have used GTK# & Gecko etc to host the designer. I can't find a way to do the same using WinForms.

Please suggest me what should I do. Give me some pointers. Should I go ahead and implement it using GTK# and Gecko?

PS: My requirement is not very huge. I need just a way to drag and drop simple web controls and save the page.

Answer 1

Creating a designer host and hosting the controls is easy. The hard part is the HTML design surface, to let you actually see the controls, select, drag-n-drop, resize, etc. There is nothing built into the .NET/ASP.NET framework to do this for you.

I built AspNetEdit - and pretty much abandoned it because it was too difficult to build a reliable HTML design surface designer with Mozilla/Gecko.